John Mellanby, 1878 - 1939

Extract

John Mellanby was born in 1878 in County Durham. His father was manager of a shipbuilding yard at West Hartlepool. From Barnard Castle School he obtained a scholarship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1896. He was placed in the first class of the first part of the Science tripos in 1899 and of Part II in Physiology in the following year. A year later he was appointed physiologist in charge of research in the new laboratory of Messrs Burroughs & Wellcome at Brockwell Park. He worked there till he went late in 1904 to Manchester to do the clinical work necessary for his medical degree. He took his M.D. in 1907 and was awarded the Horton Smith Prize for the best thesis presented by candidates for the degree in his year. He then worked as George Henry Lewes research student at Cambridge for two years till in 1909 he was appointed lecturer-in-charge of the physiological department at the Medical School of St Thomas’s Hospital. Here he stayed till in 1936 he was appointed Waynflete Professor of Physiology in the University of Oxford in succession to Sir Charles Sherrington. In 1911 he married Alice Mary, daughter of Joseph Watson, of Barrhead. In 1920 the post that he held at St Thomas’s became a professorship in the University of London. In 1929 he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society and was serving on the Council at the time of his death, which took place after five weeks illness on 15 July 1939. He is survived by his wife and one daughter.

Footnotes

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